The CATIE Blog is a unique opportunity for individuals to express a wide latitude of opinion on a range of issues. The views expressed in the blog are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or opinions of CATIE nor the views of its funders.

Category: Opinions

This past year the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network (CAAN) held its annual gathering, on the theme of “transforming wholistic approaches to Indigenous health.”

It’s a gathering of First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, combining a business meeting, a gathering of Aboriginal people with HIV/AIDS, and the ‘Wise Practices’ research conference.

But more importantly, it is a gathering of colleagues who have become friends, clients who have become peers, people with HIV who have become community leaders, and an extended family. Also present are elders welcoming delegates to their traditional lands, and children – the younger ones mostly playing with each other and the older children learning and participating with their moms.

The partnerships forged between people living with HIV and researchers have been an essential foundation upon which the response to the HIV epidemic has grown. And the time has come to reaffirm and recommit to principles of inclusion and respect in the conduct of presenting research findings that impacts on our lives.

Thanks to effective anti-HIV treatment, HIV has evolved into a chronic illness. However, people living with HIV often today also live with other physical and mental health conditions, which can be difficult to cope with, especially for those also coping with difficult socio-economic circumstances.

To provide quality care to people living with HIV and other long-term medical and social conditions, health-care providers not only need to ensure that people living with HIV are engaged in quality health care, but we also need to enhance the capacity of Canadian HIV clinics to integrate and coordinate additional resources. By integrating and coordinating resources, we help address the needs of a whole person —needs that often cut across the various disciplines, specialties, sectors and systems that we have traditionally organized care around.

The good news is that through several interconnected research studies, our research team led out of the Bruyère Research Institute in Ottawa has shown that the complex health and social care needs of people living with HIV can be met –and, in fact, are being met –by various care models, settings and teams working in HIV clinics across Canada.

The last seven years have seen a whirlwind of hepatitis C virus (HCV) drug development. Each new treatment is generally more potent than the last. The latest treatments approved for HCV in Canada this week include Maviret (made by AbbVie) and Vosevi (made by Gilead). Clinical trials of these treatments, which people take in pill form, resulted in high rates of cure (usually greater than 95 per cent) with few serious side effects. Although it will be six months or more before these drugs ascend to provincial, territorial and other formularies, their approval signals that the end of drug development for HCV is in sight.

The CATIE Blog is a unique opportunity for individuals to express a wide latitude of opinion on a range of issues. The views expressed in the blog are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or opinions of CATIE nor the views of its funders.